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"Literature precedes genre."
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"Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire."
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"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
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"I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt."
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"If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: 'What's great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!' It will be about how the whole thing stands up."
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"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."
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"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
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"A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures."
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"And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book."
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"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
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"To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read."
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Explore more quotes by Rick Moody
"But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now."
Evolution
"I didn't know how to kill off a character unless I was able, as a narrator, to get really complicated. Because it was a big deal. I'd never killed a character before."
Character
"Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that."
Life
"I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century."
Work
"The point is to balance on the edge between musicality and content."
Balance
"The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality."
Personality
"When prose gets too stylized and out of control - and Stein is sometimes a good example - when you don't know what the hell is going on, then it's kind of boring."
Control
"My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style."
Style
"I'm trying to make sure that there's comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable."
Comedy
"I always wanted to write something illustrated, and the Details strip finally gave me the opportunity."
Opportunity
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